Obamacare Is Destroying Families. Was That Their Goal All Along?

Despite what Barack Obama and the liberal media is saying, not all is well with millions of Americans and Obamacare is largely to blame.

More and more doctors, specialists and hospitals are dropping out of Obamacare healthcare plans. Even more are dropping out and refusing to accept Medicaid patients because they lose too much money. Making matters worse, a number of insurance companies are also dropping various plans and the majority of co-op insurance providers are going out of business.

Consequently, healthcare premiums are going up faster than Obama can lie about them. I’ve reported on a number of increases, some exceeding 50% in the past. There is no doubt that the Affordable Care Act is a complete and utter disaster that is making healthcare anything but affordable.

In my own case, I’m given a choice of paying for healthcare or paying my mortgage. Obamacare guarantees coverage for preexisting conditions but nothing said that coverage would be affordable. Both my wife and I have preexisting health conditions and the cheapest healthcare we could find would cost us $816 a month and that carries a $4,000 deductible and then only pays for 60% of COVERED expenses. Consequently, we don’t have healthcare. We put back so much a month into a savings account and pray nothing serious happens to either of us.

Many Americans rely on employee provided healthcare benefits. In the past some employers went so far as to reimburse employees for their private healthcare costs, but thanks to Obamacare, that pretty much ended last July when employers were to be punished with heavy fines for helping their employees.

Then Obamacare attacked the pre-taxed FSA and HSA healthcare accounts. Currently, millions of Americans have a specific amount or percentage of their wages deducted prior to taxes and placed in a tax free FSA or HSA. Those funds are then used to pay out of pocket medical expenses not covered by their health plans. In the course of a year, these accounts can save an individual or family hundreds of dollars in taxes.

However, the greedy tax-sucking Obama administration can’t stand to see any American save money, especially tax money. If they had their way, we would all be paying twice the taxes we currently pay and possibly more.

That’s why the architects of America’s national socialized healthcare system inserted a provision in the thousands of pages of the Affordable Care Act referred by many as the Cadillac tax. Starting in 2018, the Cadillac tax takes effect. In reality, it’s an excise tax aimed at employers who provide healthcare plans costing $10,200 or more for an individual or $27,500 for a family plan. All costs above those limits will be subject to a 40% excise tax paid for by the employer.

Many of you will think that this won’t affect you, but think again. You may only be paying $3,000 to $5,000 a year for your medical coverage but chances are your employer is paying a lot more on your behalf. One analyst thinks that the Cadillac tax will affect one out of every four employers in the nation.

So how will this affect your FSA or HSA? The amount of pre-taxed income that goes into one of these accounts is considered part of the employer expense for your health plan. Consequently, many employers will look for ways to cut their healthcare expenses and one of the ways they can do this is to eliminate employee FSA and HSA programs.

In 2015, the average cost of employer provided family healthcare coverage was $17,545 a year. Consequently, employers are paying less and less each year for their part of family coverage, leaving the average cost per worker of $4,955 a year. That’s an increase of 27% since 2010. During the same time period, deductibles increased 67% while the average family income increased by only 10%.

Then consider the employer mandate which requires any business that employs 50 or more employees to provide healthcare benefits to all full time employees. Regardless of what the Obama administration says, more and more companies have been drastically reducing the number of full time positions in favor of more part time positions. Since Obamacare defined full time as 30 or more hours per week, the part time positions are 29 or fewer hours per week.

I personally know of several people that were dropped from 40 hours a week to 25 to 29 hours a week which also meant they lost all of their employer provided benefits. Realize that’s a pay cut of 27.5% to 37.5%. Some making $12 dollars an hour went from making $480 a week gross to only earning $300 to $348 a week. Project that out to a month and that’s a pay cut of $572 to $780 a month gross. How many families can afford that kind of pay cut?

A close family member works for a company that is expanding and hiring, but the vast majority of the new jobs are part time only because the company doesn’t want to pay the thousands of dollars in health benefits per each new employee.

Other employers are opting to pay the penalty for not providing healthcare benefits for their employees. The penalty is $2,000 per employee. Compare that to the cost of $4,000 to $8,000 per employee for healthcare, it seems like a no brainer to just pay the penalty.

The bottom line is that millions of Americans are going uninsured because of the rising cost of health premiums or their employers either cut them to part time work or opts to just not provide healthcare and pay the penalty. Additionally, millions of Americans are only able to find part time jobs which aren’t enough to provide for their families, forcing many of them to work 2 or 3 part time jobs in order make ends meet. All of this puts more pressure on family relationships, causing problems that they shouldn’t be facing.

No matter how you look at, Obamacare is causing more and more hardships on the average American worker and family. It really appears that Obama and his socialist allies purposely designed Obamacare to destroy the American family unit, one of the last bastions of conservatism.

R.L. David Jolly holds a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Biology – Population Genetics. He has worked in a number of fields, giving him a broad perspective on life, business, economics and politics. He is a very conservative Christian, husband, father and grandfather who cares deeply for his Savior, family and the future of our troubled nation.